intensive.
Done with intensity or to a great degree; thorough.
Meaning & usage
Done with intensity or to a great degree; thorough.
Being made more intense.
Making something more intense; intensifying. Of agriculture: increasing the productivity of an area of land.
Making something more intense; intensifying. Of a word: serving to give emphasis or force.
an intensive verb or preposition
Involving much activity in a short period of time; highly concentrated.
I took a three-day intensive course in finance.
Of or pertaining to innate or internal intensity or strength rather than outward extent.
Chiefly suffixed to a noun: using something with intensity; requiring a great amount of something; demanding.
This job is difficult because it is so labour-intensive.
Chiefly suffixed to a noun: using something with intensity; requiring a great amount of something; demanding. Chiefly in intensive care: of care or treatment: involving a great degree of life support, monitoring, and other forms of effort in order to manage life-threatening conditions.
She was moved to the intensive-care unit of the hospital.
That can be intensified; allowing an increase of degree.
Synonym of intense (“extreme or very high or strong in degree; of feelings, thoughts, etc.: strongly focused”).
Where this word comes from
The adjective is derived from Late Middle English intensive (“fervent, great, intense”), borrowed from Old French intensif, intensive (modern French intensif) + Middle English -ive (suffix meaning ‘of the nature of, relating to’ forming adjectives), equivalent to intense + -ive. Intensif is from Medieval Latin intēnsīvus, from Latin intēnsus (“attentive; eager, intent; intensive”) + -īvus (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘doing; related to doing’); and intēnsus is the perfect passive participle of intendō (“to stretch out, strain”), from in- (prefix meaning ‘to, towards’) + tendō (“to extend, stretch, stretch out”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tend- (“to extend, stretch”)). Doublet of intend. The noun is derived from the adjective.
A thing which makes something more intense; specifically (linguistics), a form of a word with a more forceful or stronger sense than the root on which it is built.
A course taught intensively, involving much activity in a short period of time.
Where this word comes from
The adjective is derived from Late Middle English intensive (“fervent, great, intense”), borrowed from Old French intensif, intensive (modern French intensif) + Middle English -ive (suffix meaning ‘of the nature of, relating to’ forming adjectives), equivalent to intense + -ive. Intensif is from Medieval Latin intēnsīvus, from Latin intēnsus (“attentive; eager, intent; intensive”) + -īvus (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘doing; related to doing’); and intēnsus is the perfect passive participle of intendō (“to stretch out, strain”), from in- (prefix meaning ‘to, towards’) + tendō (“to extend, stretch, stretch out”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tend- (“to extend, stretch”)). Doublet of intend. The noun is derived from the adjective.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.